TY - JOUR
T1 - The Patient with Carcinoma of the Stomach
JF - The American Journal of Cancer
JO - Am J Cancer
SP - 815
LP - 829
M3 - 10.1158/ajc.1932.815
VL - 16
IS - 4
AU - Maes, Urban
Y1 - 1932/07/01
UR - http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/16/4/815.abstract
N2 - I make no apology for coming before you tonight with a tale that has been already many times told. My excuse, if I need an excuse, is clear. The incidence of carcinoma of the stomach, like the incidence of all malignant disease, is increasing, and not all of the increment can be explained away on the basis of a longer life expectancy and a more effective application of preventive medicine. The curability of carcinoma of the stomach has in the last twenty-five years shown no such improvement as we might reasonably anticipate in the light of improved methods of diagnosis and treatment. It is no exaggeration—it is, if anything, an understatement—to say that of every 100 patients with this disease, at least 50, when they are first seen, have reached the stage at which no type of surgery can help them; that not more than 25 of the remaining 50 can be considered as subjects for gastrectomy, the only procedure which offers the faintest hope of permanent cure; and that if 10 of these 25 live beyond the five-year period, the surgeon may count himself fortunate among men. Here and there, of course, results have been achieved that are decidedly better, that even are relatively brilliant. Balfour has recently reported on 128 patients upon whom resection of the stomach had been done for malignant disease and who were alive and well ten years or more after the operation. But such a report is rare. Much more typical are the figures of A. J. Walton, a distinguished British surgeon whose experience in gastric surgery is certainly as wide as that of any living man, and for whose clinical judgment and surgical skill I have, as all must have, unbounded respect. Writing in 1929, Walton said that of the 262 patients whom he had personally treated for carcinoma of the stomach, only 9 (less than 4 per cent) had survived long enough to be regarded as even probable cures.
ER -